The new Airtel app — more than a facelift (part 0/N)

The first conceptual renders of the new Airtel app that were used for the roadshow and selling the vision

What’s this about?

Airtel is a leading telecom player that serves more than 460Mn customers. It’s a household name in India. Telecom keeps the country connected. Today, it’s considered an essential service just like electricity and water. It’s no surprise that customers expect it to — just — work.

The Indian telecom market has come down from 13 to 3 players in the last 10 years.

For the last decade, the Airtel app has been the one-stop shop for everything end customers needed from Airtel — whether it is purchasing data, saving money, or finding help. It was the first Indian app to bring recharges and telcommerce to users (more about that in the next section).

Today, about a quarter of our customers are on the app. It’s rated #1 on the App Store under the lifestyle category. But ‘never settle’, they say.

In late 2019, we started the journey of revamping the app. It was not just a reskinning, nor was it just a tech-stack upgrade. It was a complete realignment with a customer-led digital transformation strategy: both top-down and bottom-up. Literally, every single entity under the hood that could have been touched got a makeover. It changed the way we do business. Period.

In hindsight, the impact of this strategy would come to force only a few months later. COVID19 struck! Since then, the world has changed. And while nothing could have prepared us for what was in store, we kept changing for good.

This is the first of several stories of this major redesign that’s been almost 3 years in the making.

Ten years, five ‘app’atars

Alright, that was a terrible pun. But it cannot take away from the fact that our app has been around for a very long time. At the dawn of the era of mobile apps, Airtel chose to dive right in and go from just having a website to creating native Android and iOS apps.

Either disrupt or be disrupted. Over the years, the app continued to set benchmarks in terms of UX-Business alignment. It was all about pushing the envelope and asking for forgiveness instead of permission. This is a big reason the app stayed relevant in tough times.

Evolution of the Airtel app homepage in the last 10 years

Besides the minor continuous improvements that kept happening, a few noteworthy milestones show us how the design of the app evolved alongside customer/business needs:

• September 2012: First-ever launch of “My Airtel” app. Focus on movement from web to native app for more customer convenience.
• October 2016: Integration of Wynk, Juggernaut, Airtel Money. Focus on bringing all offerings together for our customers.
• May 2017: Movement to deeper self-serve experience. Focus on 4G data status and payments: transactions, bill payments, etc.
• April 2019: Thanks program was launched to provide a more rewarding relationship with Airtel. Focus on deeper personalization.
• September 2022: Airtel is no longer just a telecom. Focus on integrating a broader customer portfolio and creating a step change in user experience. This is the story we explore next.

A new dawn, a new day, a new life

There were multiple reasons we went for an app refresh. In the September of 2020, we knew:

• The situation had changed: COVID had impacted customer behaviors and expectations. They felt safer at home. Data consumption had skyrocketed. Demonetization had already pushed online transactions through the roof. 50% of our broadband customers were already paying their bills digitally. Customers who transacted through the app were the most engaged, and the ones most engaged were transacting. Epiphany: an end-to-end digital experience was no longer a comfort but a necessity.
• Our business had changed: We were evolving faster than we could have comprehended. We wanted to change the way customers saw and built their relationship with Airtel. It was no longer just about managing a mobile connection. We wanted to bring commerce from our website to the app. Airtel Black was touted as the offering that would fundamentally simplify customers’ lives by focusing on their entire home, and not just an individual connection. Saving, borrowing, and paying money would soon appear in the fold. And so would speech, voice, and chatbots.
• And our current app wasn’t enough: As we started adding more and more to the Thanks App, it started buckling under pressure. Customers complained of clutter on the homepage. Similar app journeys (e.g.: recharging) were inconsistent across categories (prepaid vs. DTH). Current designs wouldn’t allow us to have lofty visions like ‘a single bill’. Payments (tab) now had more salience than Entertainment. The app had grown organically for long enough. It was time to give it a modular structure that would scale for the next few years.

The strategy, the interaction paradigm

The only way to break this complexity down was to go customer-back and simplify the vision. We needed an interface idea that could rally the entire team. Luckily, we had one.

A rough idea around the information architecture of the Wynk app. Note the tabs, profile, and search icons.

Just a few months earlier, we brainstormed something similar for the Wynk Music app. We had broken multiple offerings down into simple sections that the customer could easily relate to and focus on while keeping over-arching sections like profile, settings and search globally for each tab. The idea wasn’t implemented — but was a spark enough.

We quickly figured that the Airtel app, at that time, was focused on nouns: prepaid, postpaid, broadband, Airtel Payments Bank, digital store, etc. These labels were internal to Airtel. That’s not how customers understood us. They didn’t want a ‘digital store’, they wanted to ‘shop’ and ‘purchase’. They would rather ‘save and grow’ money than figure out that Airtel Payments Bank is a separate entity within Airtel.

This led us to completely change our perspective and switch from ‘nouns’ to ‘verbs’. This would lead us to follow the customer journey and have a goal-oriented design.

And voilà! Low and behold, we had 5 clean tabs that reflected exactly how our customers engaged:

• Discover and engage with content that keeps you entertained. Be ready for sweet serendipities.
• Shop and explore everything you could buy or subscribe to from Airtel and its partners.
• Manage the health of your existing Airtel portfolio and extend it in meaningful ways.
• Pay anyone, anywhere, and for anything (even utility bills)…or receive payments.
• Help — when you need it the most.

Neatly packaging these top-of-the-funnel intents into simple tabs helped us redouble our efforts in improving each stage without losing focus. For customers, it meant less noise and clutter around their usual tasks while the rest of the app ran abuzz with experiments. Hick’s Law — in short.

A few more details

We’ll dive deep into the details of each tab and their underlying journeys in subsequent articles. For now, let’s get the overall structure over with, shall we?

L → R: Early concepts of the profile menu, search & support hybrid menu, and contextual strip.

• Profile and settings are global. You can access them from any tab. This draws from the Wynk concept above. Imagine a customer accessing the same profile menu across all products at Airtel—whether it’s the Airtel, Wynk, Xstream, or Gaming apps and websites. With Unified Customer Identity, we’ll get there someday 🤞
• ‘Search’ was proposed to be global — as a fall-back wayfinder when all else fails. In early concepts, we bundled search with support (most critical to telecom customers, remember?). Since then, we have run multiple experiments and a chatbot-search hybrid is the one that stuck. A story for later.
• A persistent & contextual communication strip was an idea we absolutely fell for…an element that could spotlight the most critical service & product interventions like voice-driven guided-navigation and product delivery updates. Despite the love, we let it rest for future development.

Animation of top and bottom navigation and reminders

• Finally, reminders & notifications were tightly coupled with global navigation. Reminders would use a doormat pattern to be right up front, expand and collapse through push & drag gestures. Colored beacons would signify the health and criticality of actions across the board. The navigation would collapse/hide and give way to an elegant, immersive experience.

Living by principles

It was evident that we took numerous leaps of faith. Hypothesis-driven design was the modus operandi. We prototyped, debated, critiqued, and asked questions — a lot of questions. We failed early and we didn’t let perfect be the enemy of complete.

Redesigning an app is often like changing the wheels of a moving vehicle. It was not just a design improvement but an overhaul to change behavior. And behavior comes with persistence and stability. It wasn’t easy — considering the number of teams whose diverse work would manifest on the app. To be consistent, it was time to put a few principles in place that we could focus on and stay on track with.

UX Principles:

think omnichannel
tie online and offline communication and provision for phygital experiences

converge
choose modular design patterns for scale. reuse what’s been built

be goal-oriented
anticipate and suggest actions instead of just information

build habits
balance context with stability. build long-term habits through persistence and nudging

tell a story
don’t simply present. guide progressively and coherently without overloading

.

Art Direction:

the new design shall seek to offset visceral frustrations by greeting customers with a soft, friendly, approachable design language. this would be calming, inviting, and easy on the eyes. a “soft UI”.

we are talking about amicable tonality, ample spacing, rounded corners, squircle cards, soft shadows, transparency, background blur, organic shapes (the blob!), cool palette, analogous colors, delicate gradients, rounded typefaces, chamfered iconography, legible type size, strong type hierarchy, usage of lower-case text, minimal illustrations, etc. we maintain a premium, applesque tone.

people red, warm tones, sharp edges, etc. are outliers. they will be used with strong intent to draw attention or for emphasis only. example: alerts or notifications.

Just getting started

What started out as a 3 a.m. sketch had evolved into a 3-year battle cry. What started as pixels upended entire systems. What started as a promise is now a story of change and impact.

It’s a story of grit and ambition, of design-driven strategy, and of deep cross-functional collaboration. Through this course, we battled COVID, stayed home, switched from Sketch/Zeplin to Figma and the Design team grew by 300%. And we’re just getting started, really.

We cannot wait to bring you deeper stories from the Airtel app around the product, tech, analytics, and design. Be in touch.

Download the app for iOS or Android and tell us about your experience. Be constructive. And be kind.